Hey!
I thought it could be funny to make a thread on our preferred inspirations for ECTOCOMP.
Not only the main one inspiration you are going to use, or what are you looking for creating your ECTOCOMP entries. Even, as players, what kind of games would you like to play?
I’ll start!
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Recently, I’ve seen this video on “The Wind in the Willows”:
It fits quite well with children’s tales with anthropomorphic animals, a-la “Over the Garden Wall”. I’ve always had a liking for those.
But, the one I like the most is the one I have always insisted on the rules of the comp, you know: that one about “telling traditional scary tales around the fire, eating sweet wheat porridge.”
But those are for playing, for creating stories myself. I fear I am still in the loop for supernatural stories mixed with real-world issues, but probably this year, that would make a turn for something a little animistic. Let’s see how it goes.
We’ll see if I can actually manage to scrape something together (I’m still fighting that IFComp burnout) but I’m considering writing something about drowned towns.
I just read Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss and it has me back down the bog body rabbit hole again, but I’m not sure yet if I have an appreciably new/interesting angle on it. We’ll see!
not according to relevance, in no particular order
and of course, all time bangers in Naarel’s toolbox:
I’ve always wanted to enter ECTOCOMP, but I always seem to be too busy on other projects. This year is no different, with ten games needing to be finished.
I’ve also wanted to write a good horror game. The Witch’s Apprentice would have been ideal for ECTOCOMP, as it’s set on Halloween and is a little tongue-in-cheek. A Taste of Terror would have been a good fit, but this was entered in ParserComp.
I’ve got an idea for one game that would be suitable, but I’ve only got the beginning and the end and no middle.
I’m thinking about adapting one of the games from the BDB Project. At least four of them look suitable for ECTOCOMP. One delves into the occult, one appears to be set in a haunted house, one transports you to a fifth dimension and one deals with lycanthropy (i.e. werewolves). Let’s see what happens over the next month.
Last year, there were a surprising number of requests for a sequel to Familiar Problems, but I had no idea how to actually do that because we’d mined most of our ideas for the first game. Last week Sarah had a flash of brilliance and pitched a related but distinct concept for a sequel that gives us tons of new material to work with!
So if everything works out, we’ll be returning to Promethean University, but with a new player character this time…
One week into ECTOCOMP last year, 43 rhesus monkeys escaped from a medical research facility in South Carolina. Despite the mostly whimsical framing in the news, I thought it could make a chilling IF, whether you’re on team monkey or team human. Not sure I’ll revisit the idea this year, but I’d definitely play that game.
(I guess they did manage to recapture all the monkeys. One more point for team human.)